Ok, so LPI will be at Debconf, giving discounted certifications to registered attendees. Is this good or bad? Mario likes the idea, Madduck is in the middle ground, not decided on his stance on this regard, and Joerg basically says it's not worth much to him personally. Actually, I'll quote Madduck, as he has an interesting point:

I am not looking for employment, and if I was, I'd certainly not want to work at a company that thinks certifications are the true proof of capabilities. So I guess that leaves me with a 'no' still.

When confronted with this topic, I always oppose certifications. Why? First of all, I think they are worth very little. I got three or four Brainbench certifications when they were free - And of course, noticed right away that such a simplistic test is worth very little. Of course, LPI is a better established name, and is usually respected - Lets be fair, and talk about LPI together in the line with Cisco's, Microsoft's, Novell's and similar certification programs.
I've worked with several people who have got certified in different technologies, and almost always, this works against them rather than in their favor - Such people usually are blinded to all but their technologies. My most recent experiences are with the network infrastructure people - Cisco people know how to push Cisco, but know very little about protocol details, and cannot recommend a tool that's not madesold by Cisco. Same goes for 3Com. Same goes for everybody else. Although many certification tests include general situations like Solve this real-world problem, they are hampered by the final exam syndrome: The certification candidate spent a couple of nights frantically reading the books, and the material sits eager to jump on his brain lobes. Of course, given a couple of weeks, he has forgotten most of it and confused the rest. No, I don't have hard data to back this up except for my experience - But I have some experience at least. Oh, and of course: This people can quote from memory in inverse alphabetical order each of the command-line options to ls, but might be unable to spit up a clever shell pipeline without sketching it in paper and thinking it over for some minutes.
What will this mean for most of Debconf's target audience? Well, just what Ganneff and Madduck said: Take the test if you want to get a new job more easily - but you should have more confidence in yourself.
Just as a final note: Whenever I've interviewed people to work with me or for people that trust me, from all of the received curricula, I start by throwing out every curriculum that has the certifications earned in a prominent place. People who give too much weight to certifications IMHO tends to be worthless to work with.

I already had the idea to get LPI certified - expensive fun. Thanks to Joerg and co. for organizing the cheap exams during Debconf, I already have signed-up for LPI101 in the morning and LPI102 in the afternoon and wrote our $$$-director of the comany a mail that I’d like to get 95 more at the end of this month. Finally a little reference to the blog of Martin F. Krafft - and especially “Why? I am a Debian developer”. I think this is just bullshit, sorry. LPI is dedicated for system administrators, BOFHs, techies, however. Not that stuff what a Debian developer is doing. I mean, a DD should have knowledge about Debian including knowledge about software development, documentation, how to build packages, write some scripts… But does he need to know how to manage iptables or know where you need to set the fontserver? I think no… LPI asks many questions about old stuff, like the XFS, ISA Cards, Analog modems usw. The normal user today doesn’t need to care about this things, even a Debian developer mustn’t. I think many DDs never have touched an ISA card. So, I will participate in the exams, please don’t blame me if I fail.

Alex Krupp talks about cell phone software and why it's not working These are good points, but I remain pretty certain that it will be an area that takes off. I think that, as things stand right now, some of the ingredients are:

• Discard what you know about what an application should be like. I think a lot of people approach things with an idea that might work on the web or a desktop, and "whittle it down" some. I think the best cell phone apps will be things that are created from the ground up with the cell phone environment in mind. For example:
• Radically simple. It has to be super simple and easy to use. You should get the basic functionality from it within one or two clicks of opening it (consider that the user already had to click 3 or 4 times just to open your application in many cases).
• By making an application that's radically simple, it becomes easier to port it to all the many phone platforms out there. If you aren't doing much that's fancy, you're not likely to run into strange limitations.
• The advantages will come from what makes mobile phones convenient: the fact that they are portable and can basically do simple network access all the time.
• Since it's networked, build applications that are half mobile, half on the web. Complicated interaction goes on the web, and the mobile portion does "the simplest thing that could possibly work".

My own simple example of an application that basically meets these requirements is a mobile shopping list (with the highly original name of ShopList that doesn't suck. By that I mean that you would either be already insane or be insane in short order if you tried to enter a shopping list into a phone via its keypad, so that is taken care of on the web. Sure, it's not a billion dollar startup idea, but I think I'm on the right track with how to create applications and what sorts of things to create.

Current gcc seems to re-execute itself when asked to use a different target with the -b option. This makes things difficult. In other embedded programming news, uClibc is going to be named libc.so.uc0.9.29. The package name will be for the ftpmasters to decide.

When reading this number

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

I thought it was the fingerprint of a GPG key.The first time I came across it, it was encoded in a puzzle; not a particularly difficult one (what key is inbetween of F8 and F10 on your keyboard?).Turns out that this number can be used to decrypt most HD-DVDs produced so far.No, you can't really think you have a copyright on this number? You could have it as a registered trademark, I guess. But I think everybody will be using it to refer to you. :-)From a crypto point of view, it was just a matter of time until this number leaked out. And in fact, the HD-DVD encryption was designed to handle this cases (but it wasn't used correctly). Face it: cryptographers have been telling you right from the beginning that your encryption will be broken by it's very nature (remember: you are shipping decryption keys worldwide in your HD-DVD player devices).[Update: others thought it might be an IPv6 address maybe?][Update #2: Google thinks there are about 300k pages with this number. Maybe we can stop this meme now? :-)][Update #3: it was pointed out to me that nobody claimed to have copyright on this number, but that it is a device to cirumvent encryption and thus violates the DMCA. And that this is similar to distributing magic markers that could be used to 'crack' a famous CD protection used by Sony some time ago...]

Just submitted my third-year project. Was probably the longest document I will ever write:

$ wc -w  find ~/local/bzr/3yp/docs/report -name "*.tex"    tail -n1
19234 total
$

(If new readers are picking up the story late, in the final year of the Warwick Computer Science course, students are required to undertake a reasonably sized project. I chose to write a Java compiler in Python.) Actually writing the report was a bit more painful than I thought, dispite having collected and organised most of the data, references and interesting topics well in advance. I’ve nearly overcome some sort of writers-block-cum-nervousness issue though, which is good. I got a few interesting results: My backend system had a peephole optimiser to run on all code regardless of the input language and it seems like Sun’s javac seems to miss out on many really trivial optimisations, probably because the JIT takes care of any performance blackspots. Regardless, I plan to have a go at adding this into OpenJDK after my exams just as an excuse to hack on the Real Java. (I also did some register allocation, also beating javac, althought I didn’t really investigate way) I’ll have to wait for while due to University regulations anyway, but I’m not sure if the project code is really fit for public consumption yet, but I plan to rip out the silly Lisp implementation (and most of the Java one) leaving a rather fast and “enterprise-ready” Brainf*** compiler.

Speaking of funny embeddable videos, here’s another one that will appeal to at least some segment of my readers. I don’t know if this one has already made the rounds and I’m late for the memetrain. If so, I blame the fact that I’m getting on in years. And here, via Tikirobot, is a not-funny video about Dasher, an amazing information-efficient typing system. Again, I suspect I’m late to the party on this one:

As already announced, we’ve arranged for interested people to take LPI exams during DebConf7. As the announcement says, you need to register for the exams in two places. First go to the LPI system to get an LPI-ID, and then register for this event, so the LPI people know how many attendees to expect, and for which of the 6 possible tests. (Ignore the MySQL ID, no MySQL certifications will be carried out). You will see that there are currently two timeslots to choose from on 19 June, one at 10:00 and one at 14:00. This should be enough for the number of people we expect to show up, but if not we will arrange more slots with the LPI team. As also stated in the announcement, there is a special pack available. If you registered for DebConf7 and also reconfirmed in time, you can take two LPI exams for only 95 EUR, which is less than one exam normally costs. If you haven’t managed to register and reconfirm in time, don’t worry: the LPI exam will still be available at half the normal price. Oh, and someone just asked: you can register for the LPI exams right up to the day they’re held at DebConf. Only the special pack is limited to those who registered and reconfirmed for DebConf in time…

Well it's been a busy week. Work is truly underway, as I have just about finished the first release of debtorrent. The first step in the process, adding variable-sized pieces the size of each file, has been completed and seems to work properly. I've tested it using a single seed, and with 3 downloaders. All were able to contact each other, and all downloaded the entire archive successfully. The archive I tested it on was stable/contrib/i386, as it is only 112MB. There's just a few more modifications to make to polish the code, and then the 0.1.0 version of debtorrent should be released in the next week. It would be out already, but I've been plagued with a cold for the last week. I had a lengthy discussion with Anthony about the eventual need for some modifications to the apt-ftparchive program to support some of the proposed advanced debtorrent functionality. More investigation is needed on the implications of these changes, which will probably require larger Packages/Release files to be generated, and some extra computation time. To collect information about these changes and their implications, I've created a new wiki page.

I just received a fund raising email from Lawrence Lessig who is trying to raise money to support the isummit conference to be held in mid-June in Croatia. The goal is to raise $ 100,000 which will be matched by some anonymous donor. I hope that they are also trying to meet the challenge of getting a few ladies on board as keynote speakers because so far they don’t even have one and there are barely any as workshop organizers. Oh hey, but at least someone noticed on their website. Along with the cash, maybe they need to raise some “awareness.” I know I sound like a broken record when it comes to this issue, but the record is broken…

With a few days lag, the slides to my VCFe 8.0 talk Aktuelle, freie Software auf alter Hardware (“Up to date, free software on old hardware”, held in German using Kazehakase and S5) are now online. In comparision to my former talks on that subject (held at some DebianDays), this talk was not Debian focused but focused more on not so well known, but resource-friendly free software as well as focused on an audience which has more knowledge of old hardware than of current software. :-) Additionally, I updated my old blog post about X on my ThinkPad 760ED named bijou so that now also my current XF86Config-4 for Sarge on that box is linked in there. Apropos bijou: I couldn’t recommend Debian 4.0 Etch that much for old computers with not so much memory since especially aptitude has grown much in regards of it’s memory and performance needs. Regarding my experiences with Etch, any computer with less than 50 MB of RAM will start to swap if aptitude is only started on such a box. I’ve looked throough the aptitude documentation, but I haven’t found a way to switch of some of the tables it generates internally. E.g. I have no need for the tag database it always generates. I really would be happy, if someone knows a way to turn even only that feature off. Then I may dist-upgrade bijou to Etch, since I found that dselect is no real alternative to aptitude anymore. Oh yeah, and I of course bought new old hardware at the VCFe: A 386SX Thin Client named Flytech Carry-I 9300 from 1991 with about 200 MB of harddisk and 10 MB of RAM.

Nice article. My favorite quote:

"If I don't install Debian on this, it will feel like a brick to me anyway!"

A couple of months ago I was sitting in a north Sydney pub cradling a beer with the ineluctable jdub, the decidedly unparsimonious rusty and (if I’m accurately remembering who’d left and who hadn’t by this point) the irremediable mrd. As you might imagine, these sort of conditions are a perfect breeding ground for a particular type of discussion, and with Jeff’s departure from Canonical not that long beforehand accompanied by the then ongoing DPL elections, talk turned to the future of Debian, and in particular Jeff’s views on that future. Obviously more than a few weeks have passed since then, so please imagine this as a dream sequence with a stylish TV fade-in accompanied by appropriate fine print caveats about paraphrasing and the perfidy of memory. I think it’s fair to sum Jeff’s main point about the future of distros as one of “disintermediation” – that is removing, or at least minimising, the barriers between the authors and users of a piece of software, and in general getting closer and quicker collaboration between everyone involved and interested in developing and maintaining that software. Which means things like trying to remove the line between the Debian bug tracker and upstream bug trackers entirely, so that Debian users end up talking directly with the upstream maintainers, rather than having a Debian maintainer relaying information between the two. It also means making the path for updated packages to get to users quicker and smoother – so that as soon as a developer commits a new version of the software to version control, the next time users of that software “apt-get update” they see it, download it, and start using it. Or at least, they do if they’ve chosen to follow the bleeding edge. Jeff had a bunch more ideas in that vein – like not bothering with a central archive, but having users collect the packages they’re interested in from upstream sites all over the place, standardising, reducing or removing the “control” information for packages so that creating the correct packages for 80% of free software (that uses ./configure in the usual way, eg) was a complete no-brainer, and perhaps viewing distributions not so much as the gatekeepers and central players of the open source world, but perhaps more as systems of providing resources, assistance and opportunities to software authors who deal with their users directly – and in so doing have more of an opportunity for their users to actively participate in the project’s development, and have more feedback (and control) of how their project is perceived by its users. I’m not sure if I’m doing it justice – it’s a pretty radical notion, and as an upstream-type hacker, Rusty was pretty enthralled by it. As a distro-type hacker, on the other hand, I’d have to say I was daunted: getting rid of the middleman here means getting rid of Debian, which I must admit I have something of an attachment for… and yet, in principle at least, I can’t see anything but good sense in the idea – getting users and developers interacting more closely is important to improving the free software community, and while distros have historically been a force for making free software more accessible to people, it’s entirely possible we can now make it even more accessible now by, in some sense, doing away with distros. And if that’s the case, then we definitely should, because it’ll benefit both users and developers of free software, which is what we’re all about. On the other hand, distributions (at least currently) aren’t just about collecting and compiling software which could be automated; it’s also about integrating it, standardising interactions between software, and in some cases acting as a buffer between users who want to use a bit of software and developers who for one reason or another don’t actually want to deal with those users (perhaps due to lack of a shared language or political or philosophical disagreements). I think it’s also pretty interesting to view Gentoo through this light; that is, not so much as a distro that makes you compile everything from source, but rather as a distro that gives its users a system based on exactly what the developers produce, with the addition of only a comparably tiny amount of Gentoo-derived content. Maybe it’s just me, but Gentoo sounds a lot more interesting to me in that light. So is that a foretaste of the future of binary free software distributions too? There’s a lot of things that would stand in the way of Debian managing that, but so far all I can think of is a thousand problems that should probably be solved anyway, and not even one that can’t. I think, btw, that jdub had been reading Accelerando (also available as a Creative Commons licensed ebook) somewhat concurrently with thinking about this stuff, so perhaps it should be called “Distributions 2.0” or something. Accelerando’s a crazy-awesome near-future/singularity book by Charles Stross, who happens to live in the city that will host the forthcoming DebConf 7…

I'm currently setting up a drupal-based site. While it's working pretty well and has allowed me to get most things done that I needed doing, there's one remaining issue that would need resolving. I tried asking for suggestions on the drupal support mailniglist and on the #drupal-support channel on freenode, but I haven't received a solution thus far. Hopefully someone reading one of the planets I'm on knows the answer. The site would need to be multilingual. That is to say, not just the interface, but also all static content and some of the nonstatic content would need to be translated in two (at first) languages (perhaps more will follow in the future). Using the i18n drupal module, I have been able to create alternate-language versions of some nodes, and enable a language chooser, allowing a visitor to choose a different content language for the site and seeing the site translated. However, there is one issue that needs to be resolved: the menu. The i18n.module does not create an alternate version of a translated node; rather, it creates a new node. This node then is linked to the original node by way of some extra table that the i18n.module installs. As such, both versions of the same content will have a different node number. To give a concrete example, the Dutch version of the "about" page on the site I'm creating is node/2, whereas the English version is node/10. Since you might want to review the English version of a node even if you request the site in Dutch, you do not unexpectedly get the Dutch version anyway if you request node/10. Since the node number is part of the URL of the node, this makes it impossible to create a link to "the about node, in whatever language is appropriate". The i18n module also comes with a "i18nmenu" module, which allows one to translate a menu item's description using gettext. This works, but it has one fatal flaw: it does not allow to change the target of the link. As a result, and given the above, it's impossible to create a menu item for "the about node in the current language, whatever that means". In an effort trying to work around that issue, I've come up with a number of things. Unfortunately, none of them seem to work to satisfaction.

• Create a URL alias, including the language prefix that gets added by the i18n module, and then link to the version without that language prefix from the menu: suggested by the i18n module's documentation, this does work, but has the problem that the menu system then doesn't detect that you're viewing the content which the menu has linked to. As a result, child menu entries don't get expanded, which I would need (my menu would get too convoluted if everything would be visible from the onset).
• Create a custom_url_rewrite function to change the target of the URL alias depending on the value of the $locale variable (which contains the current interface language). Turns out that this breaks the language prefix (i18n.module installs its own custom_url_rewrite function). Efforts to change my function or the i18n version of that function to change in such a way that both translations are done have failed; they seem to confuse drupal in some way. This is possibly due to the fact that the custom_url_rewrite function in i18n.module only performs one end of the translation, while my needs require both ends; I don't know enough about drupal to figure out how i18n's other side is implemented.
• Create something which will actually search for articles, in such a way that it is guaranteed that it will only return one article (e.g., by using a special taxonomy term or some such), and link to that search from the menu. This works, but only returns the teaser version of the page, requiring users to click a "read more"-type of link, which is not what you'd expect from a menu system. Ensuring that nodes to which we'll link from the menu are created so that they don't have a teaser isn't desirable, either.

At this point, I'm effectively out of ideas. If anyone has a solution (or can tell me why it isn't possible), I'll gladly hear it, either as a comment on my blog or by mail on w@uter.be.

Note to self: Installing build chroots on Debian quick&dirty (here testing and unstable).

Package: schroot
Description: Execute commands in a chroot environment

schroot allows users to execute commands or interactive shells
in different chroots. Any number of named chroots may be
created, and access permissions given to each, including root
access for normal users, on a per-group basis. Additionally,
schroot can switch to a different user in the chroot, using PAM
for authentication and authorisation. All operations are logged
for security.
.
Several different types of chroot are supported, including normal
directories in the filesystem, and also block devices. Sessions,
persistent chroots created on the fly from files and LVM snapshots
are also supported.
.
schroot also integrates with sbuild, to allow building packages with
all supported chroot types, including sessions.
.
schroot shares most of its options with dchroot, but offers vastly
more functionality.

$ apt-get install schroot cdebootstrap
$ mkdir -p /home/chroot/ sid,testing
$ addgroup sbuild && adduser nion sbuild

$ cat > /etc/schroot/schroot.conf EOF
[sid]
description=Debian sid (unstable)
location=/home/chroot/sid
priority=3
groups=sbuild
root-groups=root
aliases=unstable,default
run-exec-scripts=true
run-setup-scripts=true

[lenny]
description=Debian lenny (testing) 32-bit
location=/home/chroot/testing
priority=3
root-groups=root
groups=sbuild
aliases=testing,lenny
run-exec-scripts=true
run-setup-scripts=true
EOF

$ # the necessary setup apart from binding directories will be done by schroot now
$ # stable chroots are added in the same way

$ cat >> /etc/fstab EOF
proc /home/chroot/sid/proc proc defaults 0 0
/home /home/chroot/sid/home none bind 0 0
proc /home/chroot/testing/proc proc defaults 0 0
/home /home/chroot/testing/home none bind 0 0
EOF

$ cdebootstrap --arch i386 testing /home/chroot/testing/ http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/
$ cdebootstrap --arch i386 sid /home/chroot/sid/ http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/
$ # you need to add (if you are not using unstable)
   Suite: lenny
   Config: sid
   to /usr/share/cdebootstrap/suites, unfortunatly it wasn't added before the etch release.

$ mount /home/chroot/sid/proc && mount /home/chroot/sid/home
$ mount /home/chroot/testing/proc && mount /home/chroot/testing/home

Et voila
$ schroot -c sid
build:~#

You don't need to be root to execute this and you have your home directory available in the chroot because of the mount bind.

The host used for bootstrapping is automatically added to your sources.list in the chroot but you need an apt-get update to install packages afterwards. Suggestions welcome.

I love email newsletters that move slickly from ranting to advertising. Here's one from Gossypium:

"We believe that something is critically wrong with all those head in the sand neoclassical giant companies, that have been built on economical models that we would now consider antique and even dangerous for the human evolution. New business models like Gossypium have managed to rebalance the relationships between the economy, society and the environment. It is now accepted by all that we will need to change and that there is no turning back. We as a brand are trying to make this easier by offering positive alternatives. So here is our great T-shirt collection"

Source I just wish I could do that in such an amusing way. But I can't, so I'm currently shuffling a few things around to make my Business feed a bit more work-relevant. If you are subscribed to my Business-only feed for the Media items, please switch to the Hacks feed. Meanwhile, Webmastering articles will change from the Hacks feed to the Business one. And there's some more changes which I'm still working out. Watch this space.

If everybody on the whole planet decided to commit suicide, which in a way, they have, would it be the right thing to do to not join in? What s so great about trying to be right if it keeps you separate? It seems like there is something precious that has to do with holding yourself above or not just joining in and being part of. I don t know. I m suddenly realizing that this whole project could be pretty damn hard.

The No impact man is a family s project to try not to cause any environmental impact on the planet for one year. It involves a very radical change in their lifestyle, as they live in Manhattan. The blog describes their struggles as they gradually move from one goal to another, from reducing their trash generation to absolutely none, declaring war to tree-killing junk mail and plastic bags, only eating local produce, thus giving up coffee and sugar (which the wife specially resents), no cars, buses or elevators, being hit by a car while riding his second-hand new bike (no new purchases are allowed)... to composting their own waste and giving up all throwaway products, including toilet paper. All this in Manhattan, with a toddler!

While I completely relate to their goal, and being myself quite picky about the way I consume, having changed my most used light bulbs to low energy ones (even though I hate the resulting light colour and quality), turning off all electronics that have a led while not in use, not owning a car, avoiding public transportation in favour of walking as often as possible, and being obsessive about recycling, I keep a 24x7 powered on desktop and laptop, my lights are turned on much often than the average house (my place is very dark), I drink tea that comes all the way from Africa (Rooibos), I want to fly all over to Hamburg every weekend (but I can't afford to), and I have not gotten around to insulating my electrical water heater.

Yet, I live alone, in a small place, and my use of resources is still quite rational, for a geek. (Take a look at the WWF Footprint Calculator: I am living as if we had 2.52 planets to support us. Although I am below some of the world average figures, we obviously only have the one!).

It is both inspiring and off-putting to see this family s effort, as it looks like an interesting experiment that I am surely going to follow, but one I would myself not be able to attempt. Many people believe their small little efforts will not change anything, but I disagree. Every little effort makes a difference when you look at the global picture, still this problem is not easy at all.

In case you need some motivation to rethink the way you live, watch Who Killed the Electric Car?, An Inconvenient Truth, The End of Suburbia or Darwin's Nightmare.

To quote the no impact man in Deeper sickness, better cure: A psychiatrist friend, Stephan Quentzel, went so far as to suggest in conversation that environmentalism could be like a new religion that binds us together with a sense of common purpose and greater meaning .

Joey Hess writes that he may not attend DebConf this year because he canceled his talk and he believes this doesn't entitle him to sponsorship. I must beg to differ. Joey's contributions to Debian are numerous and ongoing, and his knowledge and general levelheadedness about Debian are legendary. I realize that in the post Dunc Tank era people are leery of creating the perception of rewarding someone monetarily, but with no disrespect intended just having him there to contribute and ask questions of would be more valuable than some of the talks (certainly more than the BoF I'm giving :P).

I have no idea if Joey's interpretation of the situation is correct, but if it is and his sponsorship will be cut I'd implore the DebConf sponsorship folks to reconsider.

As old news say, Dell will sell computers preloaded with Ubuntu. The move to sell computers preloaded with Linux was very wise, listening to their customers, and I think that at the end they will also see some kind of benefit from this. And now we see that the distribution chosen is Ubuntu. This is important for Canonical, and Debian should benefit from this as well. But anyway, Linux as a whole will improve, as Dell is going to chose devices that can have a driver in Linux, and write or push for it to be written. So, if that happens, device manufacturers will have an incentive when designing a new device: if they want it to be sold by Dell, it will have to work in Linux. Perhaps this is a bit of an utopia, but it is very important the feeling the market can have about this issue. From year to year I am learning that a very important factor in markets are feeling. Update: BTW; I own a Dell laptop, which I buyed two years ago. With this change, if someday I have the need to buy a new one, I will go agin for Dell.

Today I gave three talks at my local LUG. The first was my latest SE Linux talk (I’ll put the notes online soon). The second was a talk about voting. I asked for a show of hands, who has already decided which party they will vote for at the next federal election (about 12 people put their hands up). I then asked people to put their hands down if they were not a member of the party that they intend to vote for, including myself there were only two raised hands in the room (including mine)! With the way party politics works nowadays the major parties are not very interested in representing their core voters. Why try to please for people who will vote for you anyway? Instead they try to appeal to swinging voters and pressure groups. If you have decided to vote for a party they have no reason to try and impress you. Therefore you should join the party and try and influence the policy decision making process from within. The issues that I believe are most important to the Linux community are free software use in government, sane intellectual property laws, the right to a fair trial, and not pandering to the US (which is related to the previous two points). If you have already decided who to vote for then you should join that party and make your vote count in the party room. One member of the audience said that he had been a member of one of the major parties but that the internal politics turned him off. If that is your experience then I think you should ask yourself whether you want to vote for a group of people that you can’t work with. The final talk I gave was about getting speakers for Linux Users’ Groups. There is always difficulty in finding speakers for clubs. Ideally we would have meetings planned a few months ahead of time so that they could be advertised in various ways. Newspapers often have columns dedicated to providing information about public meetings but the lead time is usually at least a week (and the meeting would have to be advertised at least two weeks in advance - so more than a month’s planning ahead is required). Getting a larger number and variety of speakers will attract new members, encourage existing members to attend more meetings, and inspire members in their Linux work. Talks can be given by almost anyone. There is a constant demand for speakers who have expert knowledge in the topic, but anyone who is a decent speaker and has the confidence to stand up at the podium can give a good talk. For expert speakers possibilities include academics, industry leaders, leaders of free software development projects, and journalists. But that’s not all, anyone who wants to spend the time researching a topic can give a talk on it. For example I’ve been learning about MySQL recently for my own servers and will probably offer a talk about MySQL aimed at sys-admins who don’t want to become DBAs but who just want to get a database running. I’m not a MySQL expert (and don’t plan to become one) but I believe that there are many people who want to do the things I do with MySQL and who could benefit from a talk that I might give. The best place to find speakers is a conference or trade-show. If they give a talk that works well you can suggest that they give it again for your local LUG. You can also find speakers at conferences that you can’t attend. If someone visits your country for a trade-show in a different city you could send them an email saying “unfortunately I can’t attend your talk, but if you are interested in visiting my city in the same trip then there will be an audience of X people interested in seeing you”. There’s no harm in asking, the worst that they can do is decline. Ask everyone who you think can do a good job. Also make sure that you don’t make any commitment (unless you are member of the LUG committee).